If you’re struggling to build your course on concepts, this post will explain why. About 12 years ago I realised how irrelevant command terms were for IB Psych exams. I lamented over lost time and energy spent focusing on these, at the expense of better things, like content. Since then I’ve tried to show you all what I learned. I …
In Defense of Memorization
When Winston Churchill was at Harrow School he memorized all 70 stanzas of the poem “Horatius at the Bridge.” Highlands Latin School in Kentucky now gives students “The Winston Churchill Award” for anyone that can do the same. But memorization is a sin in modern education, I hear you say. Why on earth would well-meaning teachers be encouraging memorization? With …
Travis Dixon’s New Textbook for the New IB Psych Curriculum: A Timeline
Thank you to everyone who has been posting and writing to me asking if I’ll be writing a new textbook for the new IB Psychology curriculum, due to published early 2025. The answer is: OF COURSE! With the new subject brief being published by the IB, it has allowed me to start writing (IB Psych Subject Brief). Northern hemisphere schools …
Broken Video Links – Replacement videos for IB Psychology A Student’s Guide TSPs.
This post is designed to help teachers find replacement videos when those in the TSPs for “IB Psychology: A Student’s Guide” are removed. This is also a Facebook thread in our IB Psychology Teacher’s Group but that post can be difficult to manage. Organizing them here I hope will be more helpful. 1: Introduction 2: Criminology 2.2b: BBC Documentary: How …
Understanding IB Psychology with 3 Easy Questions
The IB Psychology course can be a confusing beast and while the official IB Guide is there to tell us what we need to teach (as teachers) and study (as students), it’s not always clear. So I came up with a way of breaking down the IB Psychology course into three simple questions. Thinking about IB Psychology in the following …
Critical Thinking Summarized in ONE WORD!
Understanding the requirements of critical thinking can be a tricky task for students and teachers. While everyone has their own ideas about what “critical thinking” is and what it looks like in IB Psych’ exam answers, this post provides a simple and straightforward answer. I like to define critical thinking as “a critical reflection of the value and validity of one’s knowledge …
IB Psych Results (M19): A Reflection
It’s that time of year when the results come out and some of us are over the moon, while others are left scratching our heads thinking “what did I do wrong?” The many comments about results flying around Facebook suggest that there is a bit of a divide this year with some people being very happy with their results and …
Help us, we’re drowning!
There’s a lot of content in the IB Psychology course and if your not careful, this can have a negative impact on student understanding and the development of their critical thinking skills. I’ve written about this extensively, but as I’m playing around with screencasting and making video tutorials, I thought with the help of visual aids I’d try explaining how …
Teacher Support Pack Quantitative Research Methods
Visit our online store to download a free preview of the quantitative methods pack, or download the entire resource! (LINK) This unit takes about 20 lessons and will help prepare your students for: The IA Paper 1 and 2 HL: Paper 3 This is a great unit to teach right before your students try the IA and after they have had some time …
FREE TRIAL: Try the themantic approach with these free resources…
Do you want to try the themantic approach but you’ve already started linear? No worries. These resources can help you trial teaching IB Psych’ by combining core and options topics, and it won’t cost you any time, effort or money. In fact, it could save you all three! As teachers get deeper into this new syllabus, many are realizing the …
Love and Marriage Support Pack is Now Available
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve added another support pack to the store. Chapter 5 – Love and Marriage is now ready to roll. Go to our store (link) and you’ll find our support packs We’ve tried to make the resource better by implementing some feedback: We’ve made them easier to edit so teachers can adapt them more easily We’ve …
Take the stress out of teacher evaluation observations
This post will be most helpful for teachers who see the value in Themantic Education’s teaching principles and practices, especially those already using our teacher support packs. Having an administrator or even a peer observe your lessons can be a stressful time, even for the most experienced teachers. The practical applications of our themantic model of curriculum design™ can give …
Criminology Support Pack: Now Available
BUY YOURSELF SOME TIME WITH OUR TEACHER SUPPORT PACK. You can get your full teacher support pack HERE! This pack for Criminology contains: Complete unit plan with learning outcomes, key terms and lesson overviews 9 x topic plans with learning outcomes 25 x individual lesson plans following our C.H.A.C.E.R framework 10 x individual activity handouts Links to complete online resources …
Unit Plan: Introduction to Psychology
This unit plan is for a ten lesson, “Introduction to Psychology” unit. Most of the lesson ideas in this plan have already been posted on this blog. As always, I welcome feedback so please feel free to leave a comment. You can download my Introduction to Psychology Unit Plan HERE!!!! This unit is also designed to work alongside the student …
Teaching Thematically Made Simple
Yesterday I wrote about why I think adopting a linear approach is a bad idea. I think most teachers agree that combining the core and the options makes sense for so many reasons, but some are hesitant because it seems too daunting. They also think it might mean throwing out all their old stuff and starting again. In this post …
Travis’ IB Psychology Course Outline – Old Syllabus
You can see more outlines on these two posts: IB Psychology HL in <180 Hours IB Psychology SL in <125 Hours Download my course outline here. You can also find other teachers’ outlines that have been posted on our facebook group for teachers. Feel free to post any questions about this outline or my course. Travis’ IB Psychology Course Outline …
Why every lesson should have a guiding question.
The answer to this will probably seem pretty obvious, but there’s a little more to an effective guiding question than meets the eye. I like to keep my planning simple and a good guiding question is just one way I try to do less, but do it better. What is a guiding question? In the themantic model of curriculum design, …
“How many studies do I need?”
By far the two most common questions IB Psychology teachers (and students) ask are: Is this a good EE question? and… How many studies do I need? You can read my answer to the first question about EEs here. In this post I want to address the second question in two ways. First the short answer, that I know many people …
Teaching Tip: How to cut content and increase understanding
When it’s time to teach the new course, if you’re a bit savvy in your curriculum design you can exploit overlaps, cut content, and best of all – enhance student understanding of psychology. How do we do all this? In this post I’ll walk you through some helpful hints and show you the value of constructing relationship chains. Keeping it Simple …
IB Psychology (HL) in less than 180 hours!
By teaching the course holistically and integrating the core and options, it’s possible to teach the IB Psychology course content in more depth and in less time. Below you can see how I intend on teaching my HL Psychology class in less than 180 hours with the help of my textbook, IB Psychology: A Student’s Guide. What I should point out …
When the IB asks the wrong question…
In the most recent IB Psychology exam the wrong question has been asked. And I’m not talking about the “etic” question, either. I’m referring to the SAQ from the cognitive level of analysis: Describe one study investigating the reliability of one cognitive process. This is obviously the wrong question to ask and may result in poor student performance, unless you’ve trained your …
Why teach themantically?
Why teach thematically? If you think about it, teaching by the core approaches (or levels of analysis) in a linear way IS a thematic approach – the themes are biology, cognition and socio-culture, and then the themes are abnormal psych, health, etc. These themes tie together topics so by the end of the unit students have a broad conceptual understanding. …
Tip for Cutting Content #2: HL Extension – Cognitive Approach
Many people are worried about the amount of “content” in the IB Psychology course, but if you identify core concepts within the guide you can easily find overlaps, reduce content and enhance conceptual understanding in your students. Remember that all assessments will ask students about a core concept (i.e. a relationship between behaviour, variables, research or ethics). Let’s look at …
How to cope with the options in 20 hours..Tip #1
With the new syllabus I do like the concept of having extensions to the core approaches: this is a well thought-out practical solution to deal with the many different SL/HL scheduling issues that IB teachers face. It gives us more flexibility in planning how we differentiate between SL and HL courses in the many ways we all approach the course …
C.H.A.C.E.R: The Themantic Lesson Plan
Our goal at TE is to make teachers lives better by making them simpler. Do less and do it better, getting back to basics, yadda, yadda. If we can help you reduce stress, it will have positive impacts on your kids (see this article about the correlation between teacher burnout and cortisol in students). Get all your lesson plans and …
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